November 17, 1999

"FREE
TRADE," CHINA, AND THE RULE OF THE ACRONYMS

We
are no longer ruled by Presidents or kings, and the
power of national parliaments is fast fading. Instead,
we are ruled by acronyms: NATO, the UN, the World
Trade Organization (WTO)  these transnational
entities, floating over traditional boundaries of
nationality and ethnicity like angels on high, now
determine our fate. There is much brouhaha over the
proposed entry of China into the WTO with the pro-"free
trade" camp in one corner, and the "protectionists"
in the other  or so goes the conventional wisdom.
But the reality is that the WTO has nothing whatever
to do with "free trade" as economists have
traditionally defined that doctrine, and everything
to do with managed trade. What is involved
in not the dropping of all trade barriers by
signatories to the "free trade" pact, but
the calibration and internationalization of
tariffs, and the extension of environmental regulations
and other controls designed to benefit the economic
and political elites. Who can forget that the multi-thousand-page
North American Free Trade Zone had special subsidies
and breaks for politically-influential companies as
the Washington Post, among others.

"FREE
TRADE" VERSUS
FREE TRADE

By
cloaking their rhetoric in "libertarian" guise,
the elites seek to take advantage of the worldwide trend in
favor of free markets. Yet the WTO is anything but a free
market institution: instead, it is an association of governments,
ruled by politics and not the laws of the market. What the
WTO pact creates is not an international economy, but an emerging
international political authority, the economic arbiter
and regulator of an emerging world state. This is really
the issue at the heart of the matter: the issue is not "free
trade" versus "protectionism" but internationalism
versus nationalism. Will the nation-state survive, or will
it be supplanted by one (or all) of the multiplying acronyms
that increasingly control our lives?

POLITICALLY
INCORRECT

A
recent court case in Japan illustrates this point. It seems
that a Brazilian woman, Ana Bortz, was escorted out of a jewelry
store in Hamamatsu City  no gaijin (i.e. foreign
barbarians) allowed. She sued  and, surprisingly, won.
Surprisingly, because Japan is not known as the Hermit Kingdom
for nothing. I recently saw a Japanese television program
that resembles, in format, a kind of mass Crossfire,
in which two groups of people on different sides of an issue
shout at each other. It was a polemical free-for-all raucous
by Japanese standards. On one side a crowd of young Japanese
girls articulated their dismay at the rudeness and aggressiveness
of foreign men, and foreigners in general, while on the other
a mixed crowd complete with two Africans in full tribal dress
loudly refuted their accusations. Such a subject, of course,
let alone much of the dialogue, could never be broadcast in
English anywhere in the Western world. In Bosnia, where UN
censors monitor all television and close down stations that
broadcast such "hate speech," the producers of such
a program could count on a visit from the blue-helmets and
permanent shutdown..

A
HATE CRIME

But
the homogeneity of Japanese society, the very reason for its
unusual sense of harmony and low crime rate, is now considered
a hate crime in the Western world. That the long arm of political
correctness may be reaching its heavy hand into the Hermit
Kingdom is indicated by the judge's astonishing decision in
the Bortz case. For while the Japanese Constitution, written
by Americans in 1946, regurgitates all the familiar egalitarian
blather about how "all of the people are equal"
and "there shall be no discrimination in political, economic
or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status,
or family origin," the Japanese have always interpreted
"all of the people" to mean all of the Japanese
people. No more. Judge Tetsuro So, of the Shizuoka District
Court, n awarding Bortz $47,000 in damages, cited the UN Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,
signed by Japan in 1996, as the legal basis of his decision.
Under Japanese law, there is no appeal, since the judge's
legal argument was based on a treaty obligation. While liberal
internationalists may swell with the sense of their own righteousness
upon hearing the details of the Bortz case, the New York
Times piece [Howard W. French, "Japanese Only Policy
Takes Body Blow in Court," November 15, 1999] on the
subject hinted at the real roots Bortz's complaint:

"The
Bortz case is among a wave of challenges being brought by
foreigners who say that if they can do nothing about the famous
Japanese standoffishness toward outsiders, they can at least
insist on equal treatment before the law."

AND
THE BAD NEWS IS . . .

In
the brave new egalitarian world of the militant multiculturalists,
such hate crimes as "standoffishness" will be punishable
by fines, imprisonment, or quite possibly both. Envy, hatred,
and all the petty emotions will be written into the statute
books and given the full force of law. So be forewarned, my
friend, and brace yourself, for the future looks positively
hellish.

PICTURE
PERFECT

The
Times article is illustrated by a photo of Ms. Bortz,
standing outside the jewelry store from which she was so unceremoniously
ejected. She does not look elated by her victory: arms folded,
her pouty face arranged in an expression of semi-permanent
petulance, she looks into the camera as if to say: "Only
$47,000?" Such a paltry sum is not about to wipe away
that smoldering look of perpetual disgruntlement, a resentment
which no award or legal remedy could appease.

THE
GAIJIN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The
price Japan will have to pay, ultimately, for such a highly
developed sense of obligation may end not only its sovereignty,
but also its very existence as a unique realm proudly separate
from the global monoculture. For the real hope and aim of
the gaijin "civil rights" movement in Japan,
as the Times reveals, is to make it easier for foreigners
to be granted citizenship. "The process is kept so exclusive
that more foreigners are naturalized each week in the United
States than in Japan in an entire year." That the Japanese
may not want to become another Bosnia  or another Los
Angeles  never enters into the equation: "Indeed,"
we are told, "rejections are known to occur over something
as minor as a speeding ticket."

THE
NATIONALIST SIN

Oh,
those "isolationist" Japanese  they're probably
racists, too. That's the New York Times spin, a hauntingly
familiar refrain that we hear often these days. The idea that
a different culture may put a higher value on order, and that
change is not necessarily for the good, is alien to the internationalists
over at the Times: Japan is scolded because it "has
always stood out as a stubbornly near-monoethnic nation, not
only proud of it but also fiercely attached to the idea."
Oh, for shame! The Times cites Sadako Ogata,
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who declares that "a
monoethnic island of prosperity won't survive in the 21st
century." Like the Marxists of yesteryear, the new internationalists
 not only UN officials, but like-minded bureaucrats
in the EU, the WTO, the NATO-crats, and their echo chamber
in the media  proclaim the inevitable victory of their
cause. Internationalism is modernity, according to their creed.
But the inevitablists always hedge their bets: Lenin recognized
that the "inevitable" victory of communism had to
be helped along a bit, and today's internationalists are no
different.  as the fanfare surrounding Kofi Annan's
report on the July 1995 events at Srebrenica makes all too
clear.

WAVING
THE BLOODY BANNER OF SREBRENICA

When
the UN declared Srebrenica a "safe area" and then
failed to provide adequate armed protection to make it safe,
the Bosnian army immediately moved in, using the area as a
haven from which they conducted military operations. Thus
Srebrenica became a battleground in the ongoing civil war,
and a particularly horrific one: waving the bloody shirt of
"the tragedy of Srebrenica," the UN recently reiterated
its condemnation of Bosnian Serbs as "war criminals"
guilty of "mass murder"  the same charges
that are turning out not to be true in Kosovo. If the
Bosnian Muslim army used the civilians of Srebrenica as human
shields, and are now demanding that the Serbs be indicted
for "war crimes," then that is "justice,"
New World Order-style.

NEW
AGE IS OLD HAT

The
Srebrenica report is required reading for all those New Age
"we are the world" internationalists who idealize
the UN for its touchy-feely semi-pacifism. As one UN official
put it: "Through error, misjudgment and the inability
to recognize the scope of evil confronting us we failed to
do our part" to prevent the bloodshed. "These failing
were in part rooted in a philosophy of neutrality and nonviolence
wholly unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia." In other
words: no more Mr. Nice Guy. Forget all this "peace"
crap, forget Gandhi and Martin Luther King: think Winston
Churchill  and Napoleon. As Kofi Annan puts it in his
report: "all necessary means" must be used in order
to make sure that "the tragedy of Srebrenica" never
happens again. This is what the UN is all about: not peace,
but the threat of force: the "peacemakers" of the
UN are finally baring their teeth.

THE
STAR TREK ANALOGY

To
understand what is happening over at the UN today, in the
post-cold war years, you have to take as an analogy the popular
Star Trek science fiction series, which posits a galaxy
largely dominated by a multicultural multi-planetary Federation,
whose starships roam the star lanes and keep a loose kind
of order. But the primary law of the Federation, the one principle
governing its agents, is that they must never interfere
with the cultural, political and technological evolution of
the races they establish contact with. In the Star Trek
universe, the principle of nonintervention is enshrined as
the Prime Directive. In one episode, Captain Kirk pursue in
a rogue star captain violates this Directive  in the
name of morality of course  with disastrous consequences
for everyone involved: the present course of the UN seems
to be following this general plot line. Flaming sword in hand,
the formerly pacific UN  neutralist, quiescent and generally
helpless during the cold war  has now sprung up into
a monstrously overgrown and overweening bureaucracy, arrogant,
violent, dangerously ambitious  and intent on violating
the Prime Directive. This underscores the real he problem
with the UN not that it funds abortions, but that it is a
malevolent force in the world. That is why the agreement by
congressional Republicans that would pay our "debt"
to the UN is a sellout, and a net loss.

WORSE
THAN NATO

While the UN is emerging as the
would-be center of a world state; the real power is not going
to be in the General Assembly, or even in the Security Council:
for the foundations of the New World Order are not political,
but primarily economic. Perhaps the greatest threat to national
sovereignty, and that of every nation on earth  even
greater than NATO  is the World Trade Organization,
and its allied institutions: the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund.

THE
PERFECT TYRANNY

The
dream of a globally coordinated economy, which is the core
doctrine that animates the builders of the WTO, and not "free
trade," is really dependent on the old Keynesian dream
of a world central bank. With the WTO doling out trade franchises,
paying subsidies, granting exemptions, and tailoring regulations
to enrich politically-empowered elites, the World Bank and
the IMF will impose a single fiat currency and endow themselves
with the ability to inflate without limit. This will fund
the growing transnational bureaucracy, as well as perpetual
wars, and ensure the central bankers their chokehold on the
world economy. In a world without sovereignty, either economic
or political, currency depreciation is not a problem. This
is the ultimate weapon in the arsenal of the internationalists,
the vision underlying all the grandiose rhetoric about "free
trade" and "a borderless world." Such a world
is borderless in the sense that the power of the transnational
elites would be almost unlimited and impervious to challenge,
either from without or within: in short, the perfect tyranny.

CHINA
AND THE WTO

Those
Republicans in the House and Senate so implacable in their
hatred and fear of China that they oppose its entry to the
WTO on principle may be doing Beijing a big favor in the long
run. For while the lessening of some tariffs on Chinese exports
may increase revenues in the short term, eventually China
will face the same dilemma as neighboring Japan in the form
of a concerted attack on its sovereignty, not only economically
but also culturally. As in Japan, some day the "no foreigners
allowed" signs will come down  not only in China's
little shops, but on the "for sale" signs of giant
state-owned industries. As the multinational corporations
line up for their share of the Chinese spoils, a Chinese nationalist
revolt could have dire implications for the entire region,
with Taiwan the flashpoint of a looming crisis.

THE
NEW GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY

The
main vestiges of nationalism that persist are in Asia, but
in the Age of the Acronym these will come under increasing
attack. Just as Admiral Perry barged his way into the Hermit
Kingdom, so the Western powers are now determined to "open
up" China and integrate what had been a "rogue state"
into the international markets. Since China is moving away
from strict Marxism, and toward the social democratic state
capitalism of the West, it is now a prime candidate for absorption.
Madonna, MTV, and McDonalds will soon come to replace not
only Communism but also Confucianism and Chinese nationalism
as the dominant cultural motifs. This is what the old fashioned
"hard-liners" in Beijing fear, and the "modernizers"
hope for  that the East, no longer red, will now be
rendered red, white, and blue by an overwhelming display of
cultural gunboat diplomacy.

CHOOSING
SIDES

In
China, as everywhere else, the main issue is not left versus
right, or free markets versus Marxism, but nationalism versus
internationalism, sovereignty versus the rule of the acronyms.
No one of any consequence is arguing in favor of Marxism or
denying the efficacy of markets: the real battle-lines are
being drawn between "standoffishness" and groupthink,
cultural self-assertion and multicultural self-abnegation.
This is the main battle in the world today, the Big War underlying
most of the little (and not so little) wars that have flared
up in the past decade, and it is being fought on every terrain.
From the air war over Belgrade to the war over the airwaves;
in real space and in cyberspace, the battle rages, and the
only relevant question is: Which side are you on?

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